Staff Spotlight: Dr. Dushka Crane's expertise central to the intersection of mental and physical health

Submitted by JPlottner on August 13, 2019 - 10:31 am
Dr. Dushka Crane presenting at the Ohio Opioid Analytics Kick-off

As the daughter of a family therapist and a university professor Dushka Crane was destined for a career focused on mental health and research.  


“I was always interested in behavioral and mental health,” says Crane. “My mom was a marriage and family therapist. She went to workshops and talked a lot about mental health issues so that piqued my interest. My dad was a professor so between the two of them I always had an interest in both academics and mental health.” 


After receiving her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Psychology, Crane took a research position with the Ohio Department of Mental Health (OhioMHAS). During her tenure, she witnessed a shift in the mindset surrounding mental health as a critical component of overall health. One of the first research grants that Crane received was from the Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation. 


“At the time, we were just beginning to understand how people with mental illness were disproportionately affected by tobacco and how the mental health service system was not addressing this. Sometimes tobacco was used to engage patients in behavioral health treatment or help them cope,” she says of the grant-funded research project. “We were just beginning to learn about the impact of tobacco dependence on both staff and patients in mental health treatment settings.” 


Despite initially being met with some resistance to changing the way things had always been done, over time, Crane and her team were able to implement tobacco cessation treatment programs into several mental health agencies around the state. Crane says it’s been “interesting to see over time how that understanding has changed.”


While working as the director of Quality Improvement at OhioMHAS, Crane felt like she was ready to revisit her roots in health services research and further her focus on the integration of mental health with physical health. When the position at the Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource center came up it felt like a good match for her interest in doing work around behavioral health issues and how they relate to physical health as well as studying the integration of mental and physical health.

 
Crane is excited to see how views on the importance of mental health have continued to evolve saying, “People are beginning to understand how poverty, financial stress, stable housing, and employment have such a huge impact on mental health, especially children’s mental health.”  


She is also optimistic about the potential benefits that come with collaboration and data sharing across state agencies.

 
“We are able to pull together information from multiple state information systems and get a better understanding of what’s going on, where people are experiencing gaps in services, and the points of influence where we might be able to make a difference in people’s lives. I feel like we are truly able to provide information that can be used to help state policy makers do their work, as well as improve services and reduces costs,” Crane says of her experience. “It is very exciting.”  


In addition to her work at GRC, Crane is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry where she collaborates on projects aimed at preparing medical residents for careers in integrated behavioral health and primary care settings. 


Crane emphasized the rewards she has experienced working in the public and mental health fields. Looking back over her experiences, Crane has two pieces of advice for anyone considering a career in public health: “Pay attention to statistics, nothing beats having the basic research skills to understand how to approach a question that’s relevant to public health. On the other hand, some of the best public health leaders are people who had real life experience or experience working with the populations they’re serving.”  

 

Q&A


What are your summer vacation plans?  I went to Hilton Head recently, I love the beach.  We may plan a trip out west, maybe to Wyoming to visit family.


What books are you reading?  I just read “Educated”, it is an amazing story. It illustrates the resilience of people and the ability to become self-educated. The next book on my list is “Where the Crawdads Sing.” 


If you could do another job for a day what would it be?  I’d want to try something completely different.  Maybe gardening or landscaping, something that required physical labor, like building a house. 


What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you started your career?  All the emails I’d have to read and write.